


Akeldama

by Ori_Cat



Category: Relic Master Series - Catherine Fisher
Genre: Christianity, Death, Gen, Prayer, everybody's got problems here, well for a given value of Kest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-26
Updated: 2018-02-26
Packaged: 2019-03-24 04:34:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13803507
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ori_Cat/pseuds/Ori_Cat
Summary: “And throwing down the pieces of silver into the temple, he departed, and he went and hanged himself.” - Matt. 27:5Kest goes out to fight the Dragon. Then what?





	Akeldama

**Author's Note:**

> This is the one I have wanted to write ever since my first reading of _Coronet_. Also, the title and summary are from the exact same source, but if you're curious, it translates to Field of Blood.

There were five litres of blood in a human body, more or less. And from the look of it, from the amount of red (like sunsets, like rubies, like iron) churned into the mud and pooling wine-dark into the hollows of Kest’s footsteps and the claw-marks, very little of Kest’s remained there. 

Tamar slowed, mud slipping gently away beneath his feet. The dragon - a fanciful name, but at least it did the job: say “dragon” to any human and they will immediately think of scales and claws and massiveness - lay further down the bank, a coiled hill of shining dark skin. It looked dead. Or at least, he hoped it was dead. If Kest had failed as well - 

Although he couldn’t make himself look upon the possibility as all that terrible, though. They had spent seven years slowly and quietly failing, so once more would be no surprise. 

Kest - the thing that once had been Kest - was closer, mud streaked over his legs and chest and up one side of his face, one arm flung out to hold empty air in the palm. The weapon he’d stolen wasn’t visible, must have been dropped and dug into the earth. Whatever the dragon truly was, its claws were almost supernaturally sharp. Tissue was tougher than most people thought - he knew that - and yet the creature had managed to go through all Kest’s clothes and almost palm-deep into his abdomen. If he had wanted to, Tamar could have touched his intestines. (He didn’t want to.) 

It would probably have torn him in half were it not for his spine. Those were hard to break. 

And the Sekoi had never mentioned the existence of it or anything similar. Although there was a lot they had never mentioned. That either they hadn’t thought the men would need to know or had kept out of spite. Hundreds of years of humans panicking about what to do if they ever found aliens, and they had still managed to get into arguments with them when they did. 

Kest’s face was still whole, though. Skin pale as paper (even his lips) and eyes still half-open, unfocussed and sightless and filled with the sky, but somehow his face had been spared any bruise or break or slash. Even the perpetual darkness under his eyes had drained away with the blood. 

That meant something. Tamar couldn’t figure out what. 

Above him, the sky paled to periwinkle, three of the moons still hanging pale above the horizon. Unfeeling, as though somebody else controlled his body remotely like one of those construction robots, Tamar worked one hand under Kest’s shoulders and the other under his knees and lifted, hauling the body up against the weight of his sodden clothes and flesh. 

Even sleeping people and animals have some muscle tone, some resistance to being moved. The dead don’t. Moving the dead is like moving bags of water with an uncomfortably soft surface - forget like, that is what it is. Tamar didn’t have enough hands to hold Kest’s hands in; instead they fell limply down, like the ground wanted to keep a hold on him. His head fell back at an angle that would have been painful, if there had been anything remaining to feel pain. 

He stumbled under the weight, cold muddy water and still-warm blood soaking through his shirt, running down onto his thighs. The ground squished again under his boots as he turned, He should just have left him. There was nothing remaining to care what happened to its body anymore. That would be easier, wouldn’t have to worry about - but it would be wrong. (Exactly how, he would not be able to articulate. But it was certain.) 

When he turned around, struggling not to slip in the clayey soil, the door to Maar stood open, homogeneous yellow light trickling out from within. When Flain had come to tell him that Kest had released himself, in the moment that he’d known cold and sharp like a rush of snow exactly what Kest intended, and had rushed out to try and stop what it turned out he was too late to affect, he hadn’t given any thought as to whether the other man had followed. He supposed the answer to that was partly, because he had stopped at the threshold, silhouetted blue-black against the light, fingers clutching the doorpost so that the tendons stood out in the back of his hand. He didn’t move as Tamar approached, breathing already deepening and quickening under the weight, didn’t step aside to free the entrance. To Tamar’s eyes, Flain looked more troubled than he felt, and he saw the muscles work silently in his throat. 

(What was there for either of them to say?) 

His arms burned. Unwilling to wait for Flain to find his words, he jerked down to one knee and half-set Kest back down upon the threshold, relief flooding tingly and cold up to his shoulders. Flain’s knees were all that was left within his range of vision, and he stamped down the sudden bizarre urge to bow his head and fold his contaminated hands, because that was how this must look from the outside, something like piety. Kneel before your director, lay down your burden at his feet. It didn’t feel like real life anymore; instead, oddly like religion. 

_And so I ask of God -_

Flain broke the web of his thoughts by crouching to the same level, still blocking the door. He stared at the thing that had once been Kest for a good long time, biting his lip hard enough Tamar saw blood there too. Angry that this had happened at all? Or that it hadn’t happened sooner? 

“We’re going home,” Flain said. It wasn’t a proclamation. If the dawn hadn’t been so silent he never would have heard. Maybe it hadn’t really been meant for him anyway. 

Tamar dragged Kest back into his arms (this time his head lolled sideways to rest heavy in the crook of his elbow, and Flain stood by to let him pass, then turned to follow back into Maar. Their footsteps rang painfully loudly in the silence of the corridors and cruel lights. It took him two turns before he realized that they were both, apparently by silent agreement, heading towards his lab. Well of course, he thought darkly. That was the only thing to be done with animal carcasses, right? And that was technically their kingdom after all. 

Flain opened the door for him and stood awkwardly off to the side as Tamar hauled Kest onto his side bench. (Quietly he thanked his past self for deciding to clean the bench so that he had space.) 

“Go tell them.” His voice didn’t sound any different. It should have. Over all the years and the work and the broken plans and the confusion, it had never quite come to this. It seemed like the universe had fundamentally changed this morning. “We’re going home,” Flain had said, and although they’d all been thinking it for so long nobody wanted to be the first to suggest giving up. Leaving the world. 

Flain hesitated, like he wanted to say something - ask if Tamar was okay? Nobody had been okay in a long time - but finally left. Tamar found himself staring at the empty doorway for a while, until he became aware of something making a tapping noise behind him and turned around to see a tiny pink rivulet running down the side of one of the cupboards and dripping into a puddle on the floor. 

Right. Even if most of Kest’s blood was outside mixed into the dirt, it wouldn’t be all. One-half left, one-quarter, one-tenth would be enough of a mess. (Blood always looked like more, anyway.) He’d left muddy footprints all over the floor too. Tamar dug out a pile of cloths from one of the cupboards and dropped one into the puddle. That wouldn’t stop it entirely, though, so he jammed one under the holes in Kest’s back as well. 

He should probably leave it at that. Should clean himself off and go join in on the impromptu meeting, be there for whatever sorrow or relief would follow Flain’s decision. There was nothing more he could do for Kest - no-one had ever told them about this. The portals had been easy enough that 

But that seemed wrong, too. People didn’t just become so much meat upon their deaths. The kinds of people who thought that they did were probably no more people than meat, themselves. Even corpses deserved - well. They deserved not to have bits of silt crusted in their eyes, at least. 

Numb as though his veins had been filled with ice, Tamar bent to pull out another cloth, and turned on the water in the sink, watching it pool clear and cohesive in the weave of the fabric, soak out to the outermost edges, the stream thudding hollowly against the metal, seconds ticking by. Then he realized he was wasting water and turned it off. Scrubbed up the side of Kest’s face, leaving streaks of pale skin. The corner of his eye, neck, the backs of his hands. (That was undeserved. He’d broken all their hard work, all their hope with those. It would have only made the metaphor literal to leave the dirt but - that was the thing about death culture. It still felt wrong from the other side. )Tamar thought about the polymeliac spiny dragon that he’d ended up having to put in a tank and euthanize (it hadn’t had a developed pelvic girdle on either set on hind legs and so could never have survived anyway), the polymeliac xeno-skinks and dying birds and everything else he’d simply left because he didn’t have enough resources to put them all down, Soren’s frustrated tears when newer and newer viruses liquefied or rusted or sterilized her plants. He thought about the spiny, venomous eels that had started appearing in all the waterways, salt or fresh. He thought about the anger of the Sekoi. _Look what you’ve done._

Kest had been so silent when faced with it all. Barely tried to deny anything. What would it have taken to make him act like a human? Like he cared about anything? 

Coffee, his brain supplied stupidly. Back when it had just been the six of them, and just Maar. Back when everything was beginning. Back when they still had hope, when it still seemed the project might’ve worked out, Kest had habitually come by and poked his head into Tamar’s lab, always with some of his practically-solid coffee. 

_Out_ of the lab with your coffee, Tamar had always responded. If you didn’t want to end up drinking some strange Anaran toxin, you didn’t have food anywhere near his dissections. 

Back when they were still friends. Back when everything was okay. Back when they still could laugh. 

Kest’s hair, if now wet for a different reason, was at least no longer full of mud. Tamar dumped his cloth in the sink and waited until the water ran only light yellow, and scraped the specks scattered over the bench in too. The mud was dry on the floor, so he decided to leave that, as long as nobody was going to slip and crack their head open or something. Although now wouldn’t be the worst time, if death was already here. 

Now what? 

Maybe he should pray, he thought. He didn’t remember the last time he had. It was something he’d stopped when things stopped going well, when it started getting hard to believe. What could he say now? God, please fix all our mistakes for us? God, please remind Earth to call? God, if you exist in all times can you make it so that none of this ever happened? He didn’t believe any of those prayers would be answered, not really. But he still shut his eyes and bowed his head and said the only thing he really could. 

_God, help._

He hoped He would understand. 

There was still mud and blood on him, though, even if he’d gotten most of the rest off the bench and the floor and Kest, so Tamar went and showered. 

He didn’t bother putting shoes back on after. Those rules were for when they had still cared. 

( _Out_ of the lab with your bare feet…) 

He found Flain staring at the table as though all the secrets of the universe had somehow been hidden in code within the pattern of dots on the surface. He didn’t even look up when Tamar took the chair next to him. 

“Well?” 

Flain sighed. “Everybody knew it. I just think…” 

“It’s not your fault.” 

That did make Flain look. “Then whose is it?” 

Kest, he would have said, only that felt wrong now. You didn’t blame those who could no longer defend themselves. Earth, for sending them here and then leaving them when things got hard. All the organisms of Anara, for having such complicated feedback loops and macro- and microscopic interactions and different ways of methylation and fewer checkpoints and fewer reproductive barriers and everything else they had thought it would be just interesting and challenging to overcome. 

It was everyone’s fault, theirs for playing God and Earth’s for ordering them to and God’s for bringing them down, and in situations like that you couldn’t blame anyone in particular. And there would be no purpose to it anyway. Blaming solved nothing, in the end. 

_God, please forgive us. Please save us._

Heaven knew they couldn’t do it themselves.


End file.
